Historical Inspiration

Since I wrote my previous post, I've been thinking more about what inspires me as a historian. I think that the time I've spent in coursework and comps, which turns my focus away from my own research, sometimes causes me to forget to think of myself as a historian. I just become this eternal student who's trying to slog through all these books. It helps for me to remind myself of what I love what I do.

And so, more for my own sake than anyone else's (as I try to re-adust my focus onto my research, and write this conference paper), here's some more of my inspiration:

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I'm somewhat of an expert on the former Saskatchewan (and especially Regina) branch of a group called the Voice of Women (which was originally a women's ban-the-bomb movement, founded in 1960). I did a major archival study on them for my honour's research paper, which turned into my first published article. I ended up being published about them at least one more time after that. I learned archival research as I sifted through the VOW papers. Reading hand-written notes, sorting through member lists, looking each one up in the Henderson's Directory, I started to feel like I knew these women.

And yet I feared what anyone would say, should a former member, or a surviving family member, read what I'd written of this group. I didn't write badly about the VOW members, and yet I analysed them. I said that they were far more respectable than they were radical. I first had to get past that fear when it turned out that my external examiner was a former VOW president (and also donated the entire VOW collection to the archives). (I know I've mentioned that one point many times.)

But my view of myself, and of my role as historian, changed a while after a section of my Honour's Paper (regarding the local chapter's first three years) was published in a fairly popular journal. A few weeks later, I received an e-mail from a man whose last name sounded oddly familiar. He introduced himself as the son of one of the chapter's founding members. He was so excited by my article that he contacted my department and asked them for my e-mail address. In his e-mail, he shared memories of one of the protests I discussed, as his mother had brought him along. He solved a mystery for me, as well: his mother had disappeared from the group by the end of this period. Apparently, they had moved to Toronto. She died shortly after that, when he was still a small child. This man thanked me for bringing back for him this important part of his mother and his childhood.

He also sent me a picture of his mother, taken at that protest he attended:

I received this photo, and this e-mail, during my first year as an MA student. Whenever I'm starting to feel jaded or insignificant, I look at this photo and remind myself of the kind of work I can do.